@Shutsumon & I were talking about food words, which reminded me that I have a goat-based culture and hadn’t handled, ah, goat-based cultures.

Yogurt cultures, that is.

So here we go: the dairy case – kōm, kōtez, kōba, kōbetez, kōbânuk, kyōm –> kōkyōm

Milk, to start with – kōm
And then, of course, cheese – kōtez. This is a paneer-like unaged cheese.
Digress to butter for a moment – kōba
And then to a soft, aged, cultured cheese – kōbetez (butter cheese)
And to a hard aged cheese, named after the farmer who developed it – kōbânuk, Bânuk’s cheese.

And then there’s yogurt.

The original word for yogurt – kyōm – means “bad milk.” But, as they came to realize it wasn’t actually bad, the word evolved. – kōkyom

All of these things are used in Cālenyan cooking. Maybe in January I’ll come up with some recipes.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/434382.html. You can comment here or there.

This was going to be a post about colours!

And I have those, too:
kāt – red
lenal – orange
patō – yellow
tōtyō – green
dēdun – blue
bezhya – indigo
galō – purple
leten – black
telun – white
lēlē – grey

Then I realized that red-face (or face-red) is a reference to the war leader, for the paint they once used to mark themselves in battle.

kalō – face
kalōkāt – red-face, war-leader – this leads to kalokākab (big war leader) –> calenkat –> Cālenta (calenka?)
kalōlen – orange-face. This is a courtesan or a “fancy lady,” from the proto-Bitrani women the Cālenyena encountered who painted their face with an orangey-red cosmetic.

And, from the fact that both of these leave a yellow residue when hastily wiped off:

kalōpatō – Yellow-face, someone lying about what they are, a fake.

Which led me to
tezyu – goat-hair
lanut – braid

And lanutez goat-hair braid: someone who is pretending to be something they’re not, a poser.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/431745.html. You can comment here or there.

Last night, I asked my spousal unit what everyday object I should cover next for Lexember.

“Urine,” said he.

So, today we have the crude words for urine and excrement, with vomit thrown in for good measure. These are the equivalent of “piss,” “shit,” and “puke;” because I have yet to figure out where the Cālenyana eventually get their “scientific” sorts of words. They don’t have Latin to pull from.

Back to the topic at… hand?

These are the noun forms; I’m not doing verbs right now.

dyen – piss
pyemen – shit
tyep – puke

I was asked yesterday where the pronunciation guide is – it’s here.

There’s an audioboo of my vowels here, and one of Cālenyan vocabulary here

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429879.html. You can comment here or there.

This was going to be about butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, but I decided plunder was more fun.

The Cālenyana have a very bellicose culture, and one of their oldest words and concepts is plunder, spoils of war: dīkiz.

It comes with its paired word dyukez, souvenirs, or useless trinkets brought home from war.

And a similar word: dezhiz – temporary gains, or land claimed in a battle, but not won in the war. And useless gains, or Pyrrhic gains: dyuzh

Spoils of war aren’t just things or land, either: dīkizātē is a person who has been taken – what Rin refers to as a “war-bride” or a “war-groom.” And an udenīkiz is an idea – a large idea, some big concept – that is grabbed from another culture. The Cālenyana have a lot of those.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/429246.html. You can comment here or there.

The Cālenyena have had a uncertain relationship with art all along.

Their original word for drawing and their word for map indicate this fairly clearly:

Drawing is tyek, with the grammatical beginning meaning “without use.”

Map is tenek, a very similar word but with the beginning indicating “with use.”

“Lately,” in the era of the Rin/Girey story and later, art has begun to be more often “tek,” often with a prefix or suffix meaning some sort of art. But the words that have evolved from “tyek” still have the y sound in them.

For instance: benyentyek, bentyek, art-with-a-needle, embroidery.

(and if that isn’t a tidy way to pull together a request for “map” and “embroidery,” I don’t know what is. 🙂

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/428747.html. You can comment here or there.

So, we’re back on food today!

To start with, in the comments of the last post, I came up with the word for table:
geten-upēk becomes getupēk, food-blanket, table.

And then, a bit more history.

The proto-Cālenyena were a semi-nomadic culture, which ate mostly gathered foods and goat products (meat, milk, cheese, yogurt).

The story they tell about their primary starch crop, a parsnip-like root vegetable that is a stem-tuber, in style like a potato, is that their goats found it growing along the banks of a river.

More likely, considering the name, was that a proto-Bitrani captive found the plants, realized they were edible, and began cultivating them.

The name, belenuza, likely comes from the proto-Bitrani osani á sibellan, earth-around-apple, although there are scholars that argue parallel linguistic construction, and those that argue it came from cazenbelun, a {west coast} word for a type of celery, with a declension meaning “down.” However, nobody’s ever heard anyone in the {west Coast} discuss “down celery.”

… That aside, the Cālenyen word for “meal” is one that seems to be their own word. Lōk and pēku seem to have originally referred to “food that requires something done to it” (originally lyōk) and “food you can eat right away;” some culinary awareness must have seeped in over the years.

Possibly with the belenuza.

getupēk, food-blanket, table.
belenuza, potato-parsnip (or earth-apple)
Lōk, meal

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/427975.html. You can comment here or there.

People wanted to know what the Cālenyena ate with, on, and at.

Cālenyen eating words evolved from sitting-around-a-cookfire eating to sitting-around-a-large-platter eating. Original tools for eating were small knives sharpened on one side, zēzupēk, zēpēk, food-knife.

They discovered the concept of a forked stick for picking up larger amounts of food; this became a pūtupēk, pūpēk, food-spear.

(most of the Cālenyen innovations were originally stolen from another culture.)

“Today,” in the reign of Emperor Alessely (I think this should probably be spelled Alesulē), a properly set eating arrangement will involve:

zēpēk, in a pair
pūpēk, only one
gazē (From the Bitrani savia), a deep-bowled spoon
tōrēk, from tōrupēk, “food-field (of battle),” a wide round platter on which dishes are arranged to be shared.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/426961.html. You can comment here or there.

As if getting into the spirit of Lexember, my local radio station trotted out this wiki excerpt about Mele Kalikimaka and phonological shift.

Today’s words are an experiment in phonological shift adaptation with a bonus geography/history note.

The continent the people who became the Bitrani and the Cālenyena came from held two other nations – the proto-Bitrani on the East Coast, the Cālenyena in the southwest, the [West Coast People] on, obviously the west coast, and the Ice Tribes in the north.

The Ice tribes discovered metal-working first, and traded with the West Coast people and the proto-Bitrani. They called a particular blade, a short one with a barbed edge, yee-shoon.

When the Cālenyena first encountered knives, the west coast people called them allishia. That word can’t exist in three different ways in the Cālenyena language; it became zēzu (zee-zuh)

When they first encountered swords, it was from the proto-Bitrani, who called them tyajoon. Since a starting ty- sound in Cālenyen indicates a useless object, and a sword clearly isn’t, and since they don’t have a j sound, sword ended up tazhō

zēzu (zee-zuh) – knife
tazhō (tah-zhoo) – sword

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/425351.html. You can comment here or there.

On par with a goat in terms of importance to the Cālenyena(*) is their tent, at least historically.

petep (first syllable is like the word pet, with the same e sound in the second syllable) – this is a base word for “tent.”

(petepōk, which became pepōk over time, is “stone tent;” house.)

pazit is a goat (paw – zit)

geten is blanket, [and I need to figure out how I make things plural

gōt is a pot, generally a kettle for cooking over open fire, more generically any pot.

There is a Cālenyen saying:

Petep ō pazit, geten ō gōt: Tent and goat, blanket and pot.

It is meant to signify the needs in life (your tent and your goat) and the comforts (soft blankets and cooked food), but in later years also is a description of a separation of a couple – the soldier or worker gets the Petep ō pazit, the mother or home-keeper gets the geten ō gōt.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/424713.html. You can comment here or there.